Accusations of racism, unfair tickets fly in fight between Vancouver drivers, parking enforcement

Anyone who drives in a big city knows there's an unending cold war between motorists and the guardians street parking, the bylaw enforcement officer.

When I worked in downtown Vancouver, I could often glance out my window at just after 3 p.m., when the rush-hour parking ban took effect, to see a well co-ordinated assault on drivers who hadn't moved their cars in time. First a parking bylaw officer would slap a ticket on the windshield and within minutes one of the fleet of waiting tow trucks had snatched up the offending vehicle for a trip to the impound lot.

Sometimes you'd get a little street drama as a driver returned just as his car was put on the hook. The only reprieve came by paying the tow-truck driver a hefty "drop" fee, though you'd still be on the hook for the ticket.

Bylaw officers write tens of thousands of tickets a year, so I was surprised when the Vancouver Province turned up only a relative handful of complaints about alleged parking-enforcement abuse.

According to data obtained under access-to-information legislation, the Province said there were 253 citizen complaints about parking enforcement to Vancouver's 3-1-1 feedback line between January 2010 and December 2012.

Most of the complaints lashed the city's parking regulations as an unfair "money grab," but some alleged the officers themselves were abusive.

In one case, a driver claimed an officer made racist remarks about "Asian people." In another, a woman complained the parking officer "side-swiped" her vehicle while driving downtown. Shaken up, she started to cry. The officer allegedly laughed at her and told her to "check her attitude," the Province said.

[ Related: More Toronto drivers avoid paying parking tickets, report says ]

In perhaps the strangest incident, a driver claimed a bylaw officer yelled at him and accused him of abusing his child. The driver said a police investigation cleared him.

The city wouldn't reveal to the paper whether any of these complaints resulted in employees being disciplined but said all the complaints were subject to an internal review.

The majority of complaints, though, dealt with what drivers perceived as unfair tickets. In one case, the Province reported, a woman said she'd stopped beside a parking meter to breast-feed her baby, paying for the meter by cellphone. Time ran out before she finished, so she paid again by phone but in the three-minute interval a ticket was issued.

“Citizen feels it is totally unreasonable to receive a $70 ticket in this situation,” according to the summary of her complaint.

The Province said the city of Vancouver issued 301,478 parking tickets last year. Revenue from meters and parking fines totalled $64.3 million.

A major complaint has been about a change in the law that means drivers can no longer fight parking tickets in court, where a judge might cancel a ticket or reduce the fine for "extenuating circumstances," the Province said. Instead they must use a new adjudication system that doesn't offer any leeway.

“I felt as a citizen very rightfully served with fair process before, but now they’ve stripped it away and we’re being shortchanged,” school teacher Bonnie Dakin, who's made two complaints alleging unfair tickets, told the Province.

Dakin called the city's little army of bylaw officers "vulturous."

“They’ve hired so many of these yellow-jacket officers, and they are hovering and trying to get drivers for niggling issues,” she said.

Of course, not every aggravated citizen is content to vent their rage on the city's complaint hotline. The Province reported in March that in the same period between 2010 and the end of 2012, parking-enforcement officers filed about 300 "incident reports" ranging from "excessive verbal abuse," to threats and assaults.

Besides suffering racial and sexual slurs, as well as death threats, the Province said officers faced motorists brandishing baseball bats and tire irons, and had hot coffee, eggs, bags of garbage, lit cigarettes and even an office printer thrown at them.

Some officers reported being blocked in or followed by angry drivers, and in a number of instances, it was bystanders who attacked or verbally chastised them.

The Province said bylaw officers can recommend flagging "abusive" drivers in the city's database, which can be accessed by officers when the punch in licence plates on their hand-held ticketing systems. City records show 147 drivers have been labelled as abusive since 2009.

Police often show up at these confrontations but in a couple of cases it was police officers nose-to-nose with bylaw officers, the Province said.

In one 2011 incident, a parking officer ticketed an unmarked police car in a no-stopping zone. A police sergeant came up and asked him to cancel the ticket. When the bylaw officer refused the cop allegedly said "You have just signed your death certificate."

[ Related: Parking officer issues nearly $4 million in fines over 5 years ]

The Province said police did not respond to a request for more information about the encounter.

Steve Shinde, training co-ordinator for Vancouver's parking enforcement department, said officers are trained to deal with abuse.

“They get a lot of violence prevention training — de-escalating aggressive behaviour — and ultimately it’s not like police [who take] someone into custody," Shinde told News1130 in a 2011 report. "They always have the option simply walking away.”

Angry people are the worst part of the job, a Vancouver bylaw officer identified only as Evan told News1130.

“Everyone needs to vent and [they usually] feel better afterwards,” said Evan, who's been subject to taunts such as "I hope you get cancer," and I hope your wife dies in childbirth."

“It’s when things start getting personal that it bugs me. That’s when I have to force myself to walk away.”